


a thief's stolen goods

by WickedBee



Series: Acotar mermaid AU [1]
Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Acotar but they are merpeople, Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Character Study, Eventual Happy Ending, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Logic, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, MerMay, Post-A Court of Frost and Starlight, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Depression, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Self-Mutilation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:34:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24049762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WickedBee/pseuds/WickedBee
Summary: To become a mermaid, Nesta has to die. She was stolen and robbed of her humanity, and stole something back.To get her legs, Nesta has to steal her limbs from under her skin.
Relationships: Nesta Archeron & Original Character(s)
Series: Acotar mermaid AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1734967
Comments: 5
Kudos: 12





	a thief's stolen goods

**Author's Note:**

> Hello. This is an AU in which ACOTAR events are mostly the same, except instead of Fae, they are merfolk. This is too a sort of modern au, with the glaring difference that keeping the merfolk isolated to the sea and the humans (mostly) on land has greatly affected travel, history and geography of modern world. So, this is an Alternative Earth.
> 
> I think I tagged it properly, but Nesta is not in a good place mentally. Her support network is in shambles as is her self-esteem. Also, depression and PTSD and being forced in a body she hates and living in a place she hates. (Human -> merfolk hate is strong.) But not even living in Velaris anymore, since she was unofficially banished. 
> 
> She hears there is a chance for her to get her legs back? She is throwing all of herself on it. She cling on it full of despair, because this is her choice to be human (and implied here, normal and whole) again. So what if she has to sacrifice something in the process?

It goes like this:

Nesta hates and fumes with the passion of molten magma underneath the seafloor. She burned once with the passion of a bonfire but this alien body feels like wildfire inside her and like all fires, she must have something to burn, least it die. And so Nesta hates the reality she was forced to, the body she was forced to, the world she was forced to enter and face. She hates the scales on her skin, the loss of her legs to the strange tail she has to bear, the gills on her neck and chest being the only thing making her breathe.

Nesta loves with the passion of a burning star, but _love was never enough_. Love is trying to force her father hand and being disappointed by it, it is letting her youngest sister to take care of them because she refuses to believe their father would let them starve. It is taking diving equipment and willing to go blindly on the drowning deep, with only a selkie woman to bring her a boat. Love is failing to protect a sister and swearing to protect another, only to be brought to a conflict she never wanted and screaming her heart out when they take her. When a King murders her and call it a demonstration. Nesta fails another sister and vows vengeance, and fails so catastrophically she nearly dies. Love is being willing to die at the end of a blade and surviving nonetheless because her father does it for her. Love is her sister stabbing their nemesis and Nesta taking out his head. Love is always being not enough. Love is failure and disappointment all together in a cocktail mix discovered only when it is halfway through the throat. Love is being a star with an iron core and _collapsing_ under the weight of it.

And Nesta is _hollow,_ hollow with hate and love and grief. She is banished and untethered and swims towards the beach of her past home, out of any court domain. She finds the selkie woman on the beach, and she seems content on watching the waters wistfully. Nesta has heard the rumours, of a destroyed skin, but she never asked. It seems they are similar, both forced out of their bodies.

The comparison gives voice to the hungry creature on her insides. Nesta observes the warm sand with longing and quietly speaks she would give anything to be human again. Being human was familiar, was _home_ , was being on charge of herself, was waking up having a clear goal and expectations of hoe the day would go. Being human meant knowing how to behave herself, sharpening her words, making them blunt if that was needed, making her silence as cutting as her voice. Being human was knowing how everybody saw her, was knowing every limb of her body, was knowing the place she has carved for herself and what she would continue to carve. Nesta would take thirty years of her life, would throw out every scale of her tail if that was what it took to have it again.

Kiara gives her a considering look and eyes the said limb. "There could be a way, Miss Archeron."

Nesta swims towards her so fast she nearly eats a handful of sand. It doesn't matter. "Tell me."

"You would still have the gills, would still be a mermaid just like I am still a selkie, but you could have your legs back." She eyes the glittering tail behind her. It shines gold and copper red on sunlight, shines like possibilities and heartbreak. "But it won't be easy."

The mermaid laughs bitter and hopeful and takes hold of this opportunity in her teeth before it can run away. "It never is. Tell me."

But the woman shakes her head, sorrowful and denies her. "Not here. Not today. But come back tomorrow and I will be ready for you."

_(There is magic, to shed skin and to exist as the creature below it. It is not an easy thing to do, but selkies have been doing it for millenia and are used to the process._

_What Nesta wants is something similar, but different.)_

  
  


The next day, just as promised, the two of them are there. As the sun sets and the beach empties, Kiara pulls her in a cart through the sand. Nesta doesn't voice her discomfort at jostling or feeling suffocating as her gills dry. She takes mouthfuls of air and focus on where they are going. They reach her home and Nesta is put inside a bathtub too small for her entire body. "Now what?"

Kiara entwines her fingers in front of herself in a surprising human gesture and frowns at her. "I would like to test a theory first. Can you pull two of your tail scales' together?"

"Why should I?"

"Because I would like to see if you can go by the selkie way first. We are shapeshifters."

"I am not a selkie."

"But your shape shift." Nesta has a bunch of arguments against it, but holds them under her tongue and pull some scales from waist. The action stings and leaves blood on the skin underneath. She offers it to Kiara. "Is that what you wanted to see?"

Kiara shakes her head and brings a bucket to throw the scales in. "If you could do the selkie way, all your scales should go out all of them together and show a pair of legs underneath. You got to do the fishfolk way, Nesta Archeron."

Nesta snorts on spite of herself and lifts an eyebrow. "Fishfolk?"

The older woman smiles and shrugs. "It is we call them. Not merfolk, but fishfolk. Now, the way of the fishfolk is not something anyone can do." She pauses and when the other stays quiet. "It will be painful, and I haven't seen anyone on my lifetime succeed, but my great-grandmother has. To gain a pair of legs, you must get them yourself."

"Great, an earn your shit yourself. Tell me what I have to do."

"Take your scales out. All of them. Tail, arms, back, chest, face, all of it. But if you do so you will never can get them back again. If you try return, the water will have you and no swimming or thrashing will save you. You will sink." The doom prophecy must be know. Kiara says it like a omen, like the warning it is.

Nesta hears the siren song underneath. She has drowned once, and she has no desire to repeat the experience ever again and this is another form to keep her away from the sea. "So, if I go underneath after I will sink? Okay. What about the fins? I have to cut them out too?"

"By the Mother, no! They will disappear after you have finished it."

"What about my legs? Can I stand and walk on them?"

"They will be mermaid legs. You will not be running on them, but they are functional."

"Just take the scales off, you said?" Nesta waits for Kiara agree to claw off six of them at once. A fire was ignited inside her. "I will show you a miracle of a lifetime."

There is blood on her claws, on the floor, on the water, but this is a battle she is determined to win, no matter how much pain she is in. She pulls off another scale and hisses at the feeling. She aches and hisses and continues. She persists.

"Well, you are doing better than I expected." Kiara tells her from the bathroom's door. She has done a pause to eat while Nesta kept at it. "Most stop before they reach the knees."

She is four layers away from her ankles. There is still the scales on the rest of her body and on her back. "Shut up. Couldn't I be doing this drunk?"

"It impairs your judgement and the only way the magic will take is if you do this willing and fully conscious. There is a reason why everyone prefers magic potions and bargains."

Nesta shakes with the effort to continue. Breathes in, breathes out. Reminds herself why she is doing this. "Whom would make one with me? No, this the only way."

Kiara shrugs, but watches the rest of the process.

There is blood and pain but it was her choice. Nesta reclaims her body back to herself in a way not dissimilar to ballerinas dancing on bloody shoes and mangled feet. To own it with their heads held high and little regard for the thoughts of the audience watching they bleed.

Nesta takes off every scale of her tail, every scale off her body. She passes an entire night doing it and when the sun rises, she claws off the last of it, the ones on her face and throws them with the rest. Nesta is tired and victorious and glory feels like vicious pleasure at succeeding, a tiring challenge but won at least. And she doesn't deny the giddiness she is feeling. Nesta emerges of her bloody bath on unsteady feet and wide grin. She takes the outstretched hand.

( _Somewhere below the sea, Elain wakes up trembling from her vision. Something **changed**. Part of the future she knew was consumed in constant methodical moves Elain only detected when she tried to look on what she had saw, had **know,** before._

_It makes her anxious. Something important happened and she has no idea what is it.)_

"What will you do with the scales?" Kiara asks curiously holding them between her fingers. They are soot stained gray, but depending on the angle, shine on other colors.

"...I will take some, but the rest is yours. Use them, become a mermaid, whatever. Burn them for all I care."

"You…! Nesta Archeron, you cannot just give them to me!" Kiara flushes in red and releases them from her hold.

Nesta smiles slowly and predatory as white shark. She presses them against the older woman hand. "Yours Kiara. Make what you want of them."

"This is too much."

"This is not enough." _For what you gave me_ , is left unsaid.

Kiara cries and gets on her knees. Nesta doesn't know what to make of it and when she offers her hand, the selkie kiss it. "Nesta Archeron, you have my gratitude and my help should you call for it. I will go to your encounter and let it be known you are a friend of me and my kin."

The skin of her hand glow for a moment and fade on the next. Nesta frowns. "Get up. No friend of mine should be on the ground."

_(On the next day, Kiara will have returned to the sea, shifting her shape to something new. She is a selkie and a mermaid and free and joyful and at home again._

_Nesta will watch the shape on the water disappear and study how she will regain her life back.)_

Nesta claims her life one step at time. After changing her status from 'missing and likely deceased' to 'alive, amnesiac', she takes the ownership of her apartment from Elain's ex-fiance as well reparations for the things he sold. Angers simmers in her gut that he has sold their things however a small part of her is happy she will not have to look at the remains of her father's life. She continues to rent it, as it would not do expulse the tenants and the thing is too big to herself anyway. She buys a small flat on the neighbor city, away from the sea, and tries to make a home of it.

Harder is to explain why Nesta has gills or why her ears have a shape definitely not human or the new membrane covering her eyes, but not more than getting her legs back. Throw in some comments about her mother with a mysterious past and no other family to talk about, how her father was entirely besotted with her, and people would look at evidence and make up the rest. It helps her death was the kickstart to their fall from grace. Gossip now has it she is half-mer whom had a stunted growth and that is why she was away these months before her family shipwreck.

_A wreck is a way to see war._

She takes back her place at college, ignoring the whispers and rumours and regains her name as one of the ruthless law students. Nesta fills her teeth and claws and uses scarves and turtlenecks. She hides her ears under her hair and dresses is loose clothes and legging pants. She takes up pain meds and avoids cardio after a simple walk leaves her panting. She walks the path she has chosen with her head high and eyes like glaciers, daring someone to ask, to be torn apart under her words and gaze.

It is not healing as much as spite and the crumbs of her pride making herself refuse to bow to whims of the Cauldron and the mer.

It is not healing: Nesta will bow to no one, not even herself. She kicks depression on the teeth and force herself to get up and fight another day and avoids thinking about how empty she feels. She drinks to forget and to remember and drinks again to shut the voice telling her she doesn't deserve any of it, doesn't deserve to be alive.

It is not healing: she dreams of drowning more often than not and fucks her way into sleeping. She wakes up screaming her father's name and sometimes is Elain sometimes is Freyre or Cassian and others there is no one she is screaming for but herself. She cannot take a bath but she enters the showers and gets used to suffocating when her gills open under it.

She wants to feel more than a ghost of her past self. One day, a voice, her voice, coos sweetly in her ear _silly girl, it is so easy. Don't you see the opportunities? The knives? The razors? Do you think thrash like you is above it? You deserve it, for the sin of killing your father, for the sin of killing your sisters._ And it sounds so righteous, so vengeful, so correct, that Nesta nearly does it. She has already lit the fire under the stove and her hand is just above it when an unbidden thought goes on, so slippery she only notices it after giving it voice. "I feel like a house elf punishing myself now."

And after it Nesta is angry, because _they are subject to fucking human rights violations, what the fuck is going on your head?_ Next she knows, she is arguing with herself whether human rights convention apply to herself and how much other laws apply and the stove is turned off and she ends it pointing at the mirror and commanding it to _shut up, I don't give a fuck, basic human rights fucking apply here your bitch and I will fight you for this everyday until you start believing it._

She fights herself everyday for her right to live and every victory under her belt is wind under her metaphorical wings, is the satisfaction of being right in an argument from the start and making the other party defer to it. She doesn't stop drinking. However she stops doing it to quiet the voice diminishing herself and just screeches louder than it.

Nesta was called a queen with no kingdom, but better yet should be call her thief. Nesta stole from the Cauldron, ripped a piece of the universe with her teeth and swallowed it like it was food. Nesta stole her legs back, gave up something she didn't want to take them back. And now she is stealing herself back, one piece at time, and as the dawn rises, so does the number of days she lives more than survive.

**Author's Note:**

> I really want to explore more this AU. Next part we will have more of Elain & Nesta long relationship, Lucien and a roomba
> 
> ...I edited this more than once but sometimes I eat words while writing and Englaih is not my first language lol. I hope it doesn't affect the reading too much.


End file.
